APP new user promotion丨How to attract traffic to APP through H5 activities?

When operating an APP, it is bound to involve the issue of attracting new users and promoting the APP , which is also a common problem that operators are worried about. Without traffic, all subsequent operational actions cannot be carried out.

Currently, there are several main ways to attract new users for APP: ASO optimization, offline promotion, spending money on advertising promotion, attracting new users through old methods to generate user fission, and cross-industry cooperation to exchange volume.

These new customer acquisition methods have some overlap, but also are completely independent. For example, when spending money on advertising for promotion, it will also include ground promotion; the fission of activities to attract old customers to new customers will also be spread through advertising and other forms.

In short, the essence of traffic generation is to use all means to inform target users of the existence of the APP, and use content or interest points to guide target users to complete downloading and registration.

What I want to share with you today is a series of new customer acquisition activities planned in the form of H5. Each activity has a different entry point, but they also reflect some common problems. In total, we carried out nearly 9 H5 activities, and only 2 of them were finally retained as long-term traffic-generating activities. I have taken many detours and hope this article can be helpful to friends who see it.

1. The conditions and background determine the approach to attract new customers

(Shared methodology is only useful for reference when the background is similar. If the conditions and background are different, this article will have little reference value).

Our background can be summarized as: no money, no support, and no people.

1. No money

How serious is it to be without money? That is, all applications for activities involving cash were rejected (in the early days, we couldn’t even apply for small and medium-sized samples of brand inventory products. We relied on text messages to guide downloads and registrations, and achieved 60,000 download and registered users. Later, we were finally able to apply for small and medium-sized samples of products).

1. No support

We have offline stores and can completely guide users to register for the APP through offline store sales staff, but because there is no reward mechanism for the sales staff, the support from offline stores is zero.

We have conventional e-commerce channels, which include both third-party ones and our own platforms. However, we still refuse any support in attracting new users to the APP (we have proposed that the APP should redirect traffic to the channels to save the channels’ cost of attracting new users, but due to competition within the channels, each channel does not allow the APP to direct traffic to a certain channel. They would rather leave the APP’s traffic there than allow the APP to empower any channel. Similarly, each channel is unwilling to direct users to the APP, and the situation is very embarrassing).

1. No one

Although our project is an Internet project, there is no product manager or interaction designer; the only product specialists and UI designers are of average level, and there are two operations staff. This is the staffing configuration of the APP (according to this staffing configuration, it is estimated that it may not even be comparable to ordinary companies. The conditions are somewhat difficult. For most Internet companies, even for internally incubated projects, the operations team has at least seven to eight people).

Faced with the above background conditions, when attracting new customers, our room for maneuver is very limited. The resources we have are:

1. A technical team that can meet our needs;
2. With operations, products, and UI, we can plan H5 activities to attract new customers;
3. There are small samples and 15g trial packs, which can be used when attracting new customers.

If your situation is similar to mine, please read on:

2. There are two ways to attract new users through H5.

1. Content wins

Use H5 to spread the core information of the APP to target users, use the content contained in the APP itself to attract users, and guide users to download and register.

Typical representatives: Zhihu and Xiaohongshu.

In the early stages of attracting new users, users downloaded these apps more because they were attracted by the product features rather than benefits such as subsidies.

1. Winning by benefit points

Through subsidies, free gifts and other interest points, we spread the APP and guide users to download and register.

Typical representatives: Didi, Luckin

When attracting new users, they tend to guide them to download and register by giving them direct benefits.

However, our products have no advantages in terms of content, and the product positioning has not been determined yet; therefore, it is impossible to guide users to download and register through content. Even after understanding your product, users may not even want to register. Therefore, we adopt the second method to reach the target users through interest points.

(This can be judged by the download-to-registration conversion rate. After downloading, a part of the content can be opened for users to browse, and the download-to-registration conversion rate of users in this case can be observed. "Low" means that your product is not attractive; "high" means that your core functions are very hardcore, so what you need to do is to let more people know that your APP has these core functions.)

3. H5 new customer acquisition methods and effect sharing

Activity 1

Activity format introduction

Make a puzzle H5, users can click on the fragmented puzzle pieces to form a complete picture. If successful, they can enter the number and receive a prize. After successfully receiving the prize on the H5 end, they need to download the APP to complete the delivery address.

Activity Flowchart

Activity effect review

Game promotion channels: official WeChat account, with a total of 8,071 reads, and WeChat group reaching 800 people; the WeChat Moments audience totaled about 50,000 people.

Game release time: 14:00

Activity Summary

The entire activity took a week from planning to development to launch, but the expected effect in attracting new users was not achieved. There are several main reasons:

1. Release time: According to the peak user behavior hours of 12:00/22:00 published by Tencent, we released it at 14:00, which is not during the peak hours when WeChat users are active (don’t ask why it was released at 14:00, I was in a meeting and didn’t pay attention, and the release originally scheduled for 12:00 was inexplicably changed to 14:00).

2. Users are less willing to forward: On the one hand, it is related to the time it takes to reach users, and on the other hand, it is not spread in the community, but more often reaches a single user group, so the forwarding effect will be relatively low; and this activity has restrictions, and each user can only help one person, which prohibits the game from completing the activity through mutual help within the group.

The original purpose of this design was to force users to forward and spread the information, but the actual situation is that users will choose to give up spreading the information and not participate in the game. Afterwards, we made two more games with similar logic, but the results were not satisfactory. The main limitation was the dissemination. If the activities could not reach more users to participate, the effect of attracting new users would inevitably be mediocre.

“Activities that fail to generate communication are doomed to fail”

Activity 2

This is an old activity to attract new users, which attracts new users through the old users of the APP. It is also a common method of attracting new users for most APPs and has a low cost.

Activity format introduction

If old users invite their friends to download and register the APP, they can get the number of invitations and redeem a certain product on the platform with a certain number of invitations.

Activity Flowchart

Activity effect review

The number of users participating in the game each month is around 27,000, and the number of new download and registered users brought by the game each month is around 13,000. The game has now been transformed into a regular game, bringing in about 10,000 new download and registered users every month.

Initially, the number of users participating in the first version was only a thousand. In the middle, version 2.0 was iterated, and a "newcomer exclusive zone" was added, that is, every participating user can redeem a product with a very low number of people, but such an opportunity only happens once. The purpose is to lower the threshold for participation in the event, guide the daily active users of the APP to participate in the game, and expand the dissemination of the game. After this modification, the participation rate of this game continued to increase as daily active users increased.

Activity 3

This game is developed through mini-programs. We have previously developed an H5-based game. This type of game can only reach users through Moments and official WeChat accounts. It is difficult to spread among user groups and has a high threshold for participation. Later, I found that it was easier to share mini programs within the group, so I developed a new user acquisition activity on the mini program side.

The format of the activity is very simple. Since the core essence of attracting new users is to provide users with benefits and encourage them to download the APP, all fancy packaging was removed when setting up this activity.

Activity format introduction

Users can click to participate, choose their favorite products, enter their mobile phone number to receive them, and after success, download the APP and complete the delivery address information.

Activity Flowchart

Activity effect review

Since its launch, this game has been able to bring a stable number of downloads and registered users to the app every month, with approximately 50,000 new downloads and registrations per month. It is also the game with the best effect in attracting new users in the entire APP. The conversion rate for users who participated in receiving trial packages was 88.17%. The conversion rate for users who received trial packages to download the APP was 84.37%. In just two months, the mini program also brought in 260,000 new users. It is currently a relatively satisfactory activity for attracting new players to the game.

“Simple and crude is often the most effective”

Activity 4

The benefit of this activity is still for users who have not registered for the APP, but we hope to use the active population of the APP to share and spread this game. The motivation for sharing and spreading comes from the fun of the game, not the profit point.

Activity format introduction

When users on the APP participate in the game interaction, a character tag will be generated after the game is completed, which can be forwarded and shared to the circle of friends. Taking advantage of Queen's Day, users can enter a number to receive a gift, but users who have registered for the APP can only receive virtual prizes.

Activity Flowchart

Activity effect review

The activity lasted for 2 weeks and only brought 550 new users to the APP, which can be considered a failed game. The number of users participating in the event was over 9,000, and the number of participants was close to 40,000, which means that on average each person participated in the game 4 to 5 times.

In terms of the fun of the activity, users play it repeatedly more often; however, in terms of dissemination, users’ willingness to share is very low, or after sharing, even fewer people download the APP to participate in the interaction.

This approach of hoping to guide users to share and forward content through interesting content, thereby triggering other users to download an APP, has too high a participation cost and is not recommended. We made a prediction before the event went online, and this result verified our guess.

IV. In Summary

There are two ways to attract new users to APP through H5:

1. When your APP itself is particularly complete and user stickiness, retention, and activity are all very high, you may want to try sharing some content to guide user behavior.
2. If your APP is general and its market positioning is unclear, and you use the method of attracting new users through benefits, then when setting up activities, the shorter the activity path, the better, and the lower the recognition cost of users participating in the activities, the better.

In a word, simple and crude is the most effective!

Related reading:

1. APP promotion and operation: How to maximize the effect of your activities?

2. APP promotion planning: 60,000 paying users increased within 7 days of beta testing!

3. APP promotion activities: How to plan a screen-sweeping event?

4. A complete list of APP promotion methods in 2019, take it and don’t thank me!

5. How to carry out APP promotion and marketing? What are the common methods?

6. APP promotion case: How to go from 0 to millions of users?

Author: Trinity

Source: Trinity